'Wild Fictions Essays' By Amitav Ghosh | Searingly Powerful, Stunningly Honest

Essays written at different points of time, in response to or inspired by different stimuli, involving different parts of the world, consisting of people—marginal, anonymous, and marooned between intimations of extinction and somehow remaining afloat—through these seemingly disparate essays, it could be difficult to find common underlying themes and threads. And yet 'Wild Fictions' by Amitav Ghosh (Fourth Estate) is not an arbitrary collection of essays. Essays in the collection summon a sense of urgent immediacy while exploring dialogic possibilities between present and past on behalf of a future that appears increasingly fraught and fissured. Searingly powerful, stunningly honest, morally courageous, and written with literary flair, these essays amount to a real tour de force.

Underlying Threads

🔯Though the collection is divided into six sections, including Climate Change and Environment, Witnesses, Travel and Discovery, Narratives, Conversations and Presentations, certain common underlying themes  stand out.

♏First,  these essays embody a diligent critique of modernity's anthropocentrism that tends to elevate humans above all other species, above the earth itself—that has wreaked incalculable havoc upon the planet.

🀅Second, Ghosh is convinced that the era that began with the industrial revolution and got imbricated with capitalist modernity is on its last legs with inevitable transitional ambiguities, dislocations, and uncertainties (Gramsci's 'a time of monsters'). But while Gramscian monsters were fascists, political creatures, these monsters today include extreme weather events. The theme of climate change and environmental crisis runs throughout the book.

🌳Third, many of the essays strive to retrieve and rehabilitate marginal and anonymous characters like sailors (lascars), soldiers (Sepoys), and indentured labour (Girmitiyas) in the historical context while investing them with historicity and agency.

⭕Fourth, Ghosh highlights the power and instrumentality of fiction, oral traditions, stories and poetry in both reconstructing history and in mustering alternative possibilities against 'time of monsters'.

⛦Fifth, all through the book, Ghosh pits a heterogeneous, contextualising, pluralising dynamic against the imposition of a homogenising and reductive impulse.

ཧSixth, the issue of imperialism in its colonial version and the attempts to resurrect imperialism, especially after the end of the cold war and its implications for the world, inform many of the essays.

But most of all, 'Wild Fictions' is an insistent plea to accept and deemphasise anthropocentric hubris in order to restore the gravely endangered landscapes to which we all belong.

Climate Change And Environment

꧅A major part of the book seeks to understand the ways climate change has been unfolding across the globe, its devastating consequences, our utter incomprehension, and possible solutions. Seeking to decode the connection between global warming and migration to the west, he doesn't hasten to conclude that migration stems from only global warming. He lists out a number of factors including the internet and social media generated upsurge of mimetic aspirations in the poor countries. He argues that for a migrant of say from Bangladesh, climate events and consumer culture have begun to impact at the same time. Capitalist consumerism has led to the 'homogenisation of desire' across the world while also unleashing forces accentuating the planetary crisis.

Through the essays centred on the Bay of Bengal, the fury of cyclone, the once proposed tourism complex in the Sundarbans and the Tsunami- devastated Andaman, Ghosh highlights 'catastrophic convergence' of flawed policy, economic overexploitation, unsustainable forms of waste management, climate change and most of all, our insatiable greed. His discussion of the phenomenon of 'Disaster Capitalists'- champions and beneficiaries of fanciful projects in the ecological hotspots—is a cautionary reminder to the citizens to understand the big picture.

Retrieving Marginal and Forgotten Characters

🌱This section dealing with anonymous subalterns—lascars, sepoys, girmitiyas about whom absences and silences abound- makes for a compelling read. Two essays about the fate of the Indian soldiers during the First World War- deal with two books titled 'Abhi Le Baghdad'( On to Baghdad) by Sisir Sarbadhikari and 'Kalyan Pradeep' by Mokkhoda Debi. Sarbadhikari served as part of Bengal Ambulance Corps and his writing- Ghosh says- has the quality of ethnographic detachment. The siege of Kut al-Amara and the subsequent British surrender to the Turkish forces receive a detailed treatment. Mokkhoda Debi's 'Kalyan Pradeep' is a grandmother's tribute to her grandson, Kalyan Mukherji, a casualty of the Mesopotamian campaign. Ghosh finds the literary silence of the Indian soldiers about the First World War intriguing, given their massive involvement and especially because it was an 'enormously fecund subject for soldiers of other nations.'

While discussing 'lascars' (sailors) and the Laskari language that Ghosh makes insightful comments. Derived from a host of Asian and African countries, Ghosh argues that they were the first Asians and Africans to participate freely and in substantive numbers in a 'globalised workspace. Further, they were the first to be familiar with colloquial European languages. Even further, like many paperless migrants in the west today, lascars were probably suspicious of public scrutiny- so there is total silence on their parts. The essay comes to terms with hierarchy, racism and inevitable violence on the ships but there would be inevitable interaction and mutual learning as well: 'Kamara(room), derived from the Portuguese 'Camara' was derived from the Laskari use of it to mean cabin.

Wild Fictions

𓂃Critical of the modern West's dominant style of science and its obsessive fixation with 'manipulation, control, prediction and power', Ghosh underlines the power of stories, fictions and poems in restoring the extremely strained relationship between us and our endangered landscapes. Ghosh's novel on the Sundarbans titled ' The Hungry Tide', describes in great details the cult of 'Bon Bibi' and her brother , Shah Jongoli. Very interestingly, their antecedents are Islamic as they are said to have travelled from Arabia to 'athhero Bhatir Desh'( the country of eighteen tides), their way of worship is Hindu. For her devotees, the forest must never be entered except in circumstances of demonstrable need, thus embodying the ideas of balance, reverence and the limitation of greed.

Ghosh cites another story- 'The Indian Hut' by Saint Pierre to emphasise the centrality of nature to learning and knowledge, how culture could be embedded in nature and how the two need not be on adversarial terms. These stories are also a critique of the colonial approach to the forests which sought to purge people from the forests.

Critique Of Modernity

🐎Ghosh is almost scathing in his denunciation of modernity. He argues that the teleology that had sustained modernity with its promises of never-ending growth and progress was a delusion. In his view, capitalist modernity with its anthropocentric hubris is responsible for the planetary crisis; that high modernity taught us that the earth was inert and existed to be exploited by human beings; that the era of Euro-centred modernity is ending. He argues that the 9/11 attack was the reminder that the world was entering a 'time of monsters' when an old era was dying and a new one was struggling to be born.

ꦏThe book also contains essays on his sense of wanderlust and xenophilia, his extremely engaging epistolary exchanges with Dipesh Chakrabarty, his reviews of Shashi Tharoor 's 'An Era of Darkness' and Priya Satia's 'Time's Monster', and among others, also an interesting essay on humble Banyan which he loathes calling vest or sleeveless undershirt.

𝓀Despite the fact that these essays appear familiar as one has come across most of them at different points of time, the book- in its entirety—makes for an interesting read. His ability to weave history with fiction, perseverance in retrieving obscure materials to bring anonymous subalterns to light, ideological critique of high modernity and sensitivity and empathy which he deploys to argue his position, make the book stand out.